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Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes

Practise Google Professional Cloud Architect Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

82 questions20 easy39 medium23 hard

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What to know about Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes

Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

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Common Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes exam traps

  • Answering from memory before reading the full scenario.
  • Missing a constraint such as cost, availability, security, scope or command context.
  • Choosing a broad answer when the question asks for the most specific fix.
  • Ignoring why the wrong options are tempting.

Question index

All Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes questions (82)

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1

A company uses BigQuery for large-scale analytics. They have a fixed monthly budget and want to ensure predictable costs for query processing, even when many users run concurrent queries. Which BigQuery pricing model should they use?

Hard
2

A financial services firm runs batch risk calculations nightly using a large Compute Engine VM with a GPU. Jobs complete in 4 hours but are not time-sensitive. To reduce costs without sacrificing reliability, the firm enables preemptible VMs but finds that jobs are interrupted and restarting from scratch causes delays. What is the best approach to improve reliability while maintaining cost savings?

Hard
3

A company wants to optimise costs for their BigQuery workloads. They have a predictable set of queries that run every hour, with occasional ad-hoc queries from analysts. They want to reduce the cost of the scheduled queries while keeping the ad-hoc queries cost-effective. Which pricing model should they choose?

Medium
4

A company's BigQuery costs are higher than expected. They run many ad-hoc queries with filters on the 'transaction_date' column and 'customer_id' column. They also have a materialized view that is rarely used. Which combination of actions will MOST effectively reduce query costs?

Hard
5

A company wants to analyze their Google Cloud spending and receive recommendations for rightsizing resources. Which tool provides this functionality?

Easy
6

A company wants to implement blameless postmortems as part of their SRE practices. Which THREE principles should they follow?

Medium
7

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine behind a HTTP(S) Load Balancer. They want to reduce latency for users worldwide. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Medium
8

A company wants to reduce costs for their BigQuery workloads. Which TWO actions will help achieve this?

Medium
9

A company wants to set a monthly spending limit for their Compute Engine usage and receive alerts when spending exceeds a threshold. Which tool should they use?

Easy
10

A company is migrating 50 TB of on-premises file server data to Cloud Storage. The network bandwidth is limited to 100 Mbps. What is the most cost-effective and time-efficient migration method?

Easy
11

A company runs batch analytics workloads on Compute Engine that can tolerate interruptions. They want to reduce compute costs by up to 60-90%. Which compute option is the most cost-effective?

Medium
12

A company wants to migrate 200 TB of on-premises file shares to Cloud Storage. The network is slow (50 Mbps) and the project is time-sensitive. Which THREE services should they use? (Choose 3)

Hard
13

A company has a BigQuery dataset with a growing fact table (500 million rows, added daily). Queries that filter on a date column and group by a product ID are slow. The team wants to optimise query performance without increasing slot costs. Which two actions should they take? (Choose TWO.)

Hard
14

A startup is building a real-time multiplayer game with global players. They need a database that provides strong consistency across regions and can handle millions of concurrent users. They anticipate rapid growth and want to avoid downtime for scaling. Which database service meets these requirements?

Hard
15

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on Compute Engine. The application requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours. Which TWO strategies meet these requirements? (Choose 2)

Medium
16

A company needs to transfer 200 TB of data from on-premises to Cloud Storage within one week. The on-premises network upload speed is 100 Mbps. Which method should they use?

Hard
17

A company uses Cloud CDN to serve static content from a Cloud Storage bucket. They update the content every 2 hours, but users sometimes see stale content for up to 24 hours. They need users to see the latest content within 5 minutes of an update. Which action should they take?

Hard
18

A company is migrating 50 on-premises VMs to Compute Engine. They need to minimise downtime and want an automated lift-and-shift migration that replicates disks incrementally. Which Google Cloud service should be used?

Medium
19

A company uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and experiences connection spikes that cause connection limits to be exceeded. They need a solution to manage connection pooling. Which approach should they take?

Medium
20

A team uses BigQuery for analytics. They notice that queries against a table with billions of rows are slow and expensive. The table is partitioned by ingestion time and has no clustering. Queries frequently filter on a 'customer_id' column. Which optimization would MOST reduce query cost and latency?

Hard
21

A company wants to reduce costs for a batch analytics job that runs nightly for 4 hours on Compute Engine VMs. The job is fault-tolerant and can handle instance restarts. Which Compute Engine VM pricing model is MOST cost-effective?

Easy
22

A company has a Bigtable instance handling time-series data. Write throughput is below expectations and latency is high. The row key format is `userid_timestamp`. Which row key design change would MOST improve performance?

Hard
23

A company wants to reduce costs for their steady-state Compute Engine workloads. They have 10 n1-standard-4 VMs running 24/7. Which TWO actions will reduce costs? (Choose 2)

Medium
24

A team uses BigQuery for real-time dashboarding. Queries on a large table take over 30 seconds. The table is date-partitioned and has high cardinality in the `user_id` column. Which optimization is MOST likely to reduce query latency?

Hard
25

A team uses Cloud CDN to cache static assets. They update assets by deploying new versions with new URLs. However, sometimes they need to invalidate the cache for a critical fix immediately without changing the URL. What should they do?

Medium
26

A company has a Cloud Bigtable instance with 10 nodes. They notice read latency increases during peak hours. Monitoring shows CPU utilization at 70%. Which action will most effectively reduce read latency?

Hard
27

An organization runs a critical application on Compute Engine with a 99.99% SLO. They have set an error budget of 0.01% over a 30-day window. Recently, an unexpected traffic spike caused a 0.005% error rate for a few hours. Which THREE actions align with SRE best practices? (Choose 3)

Hard
28

A company needs to choose between Cloud Spanner and Firestore for a global inventory application that requires strong consistency and horizontal scaling. The application has a fixed schema with complex joins. Which database is most appropriate?

Medium
29

A company is performing a TCO analysis to compare on-premises costs with Google Cloud. Which cost should they include as a hidden operational cost on-premises?

Medium
30

An organization wants to reduce costs for a batch data processing job that runs nightly and is resilient to interruptions. The job can be restarted from checkpoints. Which Compute Engine VM pricing model should be used?

Easy
31

A company is migrating an on-premises PostgreSQL database (5 TB) to Cloud SQL. They need minimal downtime and automated schema conversion if needed. Which GCP service should they use?

Medium
32

An engineer wants to migrate an on-premises MySQL database (5.6) to Cloud SQL for MySQL with minimal downtime. Which service should they use?

Easy
33

A company wants to reduce Cloud Storage costs for archival data that is accessed less than once a year. They have data stored in Standard storage class. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
34

A company runs batch analytics workloads each night on Compute Engine VMs. The workloads are fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. The finance team wants to reduce compute costs. Which Compute Engine pricing model should they use?

Medium
35

A media company stores video files in Cloud Storage for streaming. Infrequently accessed videos older than 90 days are currently in Standard storage. To reduce costs, they want to automatically move these files to a lower-cost storage class and delete them after 3 years. Which configuration should they use?

Medium
36

An organization is planning to move 500 TB of archival data from on-premises to Cloud Storage. The data is not frequently accessed, and the network bandwidth is limited to 100 Mbps. What is the most efficient migration approach?

Easy
37

A company has a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance that experiences high connection overhead. Developers frequently open and close connections. Which solution reduces connection overhead without code changes?

Easy
38

A company wants to use BigQuery with a predictable monthly cost, regardless of query volume. They have a steady state of around 500 concurrent slots. Which pricing model should they choose?

Medium
39

A company needs to store petabytes of time-series IoT sensor data and query it with single-digit millisecond latency at millions of reads per second. The data has a simple key-value structure with timestamps. Which Google Cloud database is MOST appropriate?

Medium
40

A company running a globally distributed application uses Firestore in Native mode. They need strong consistency for reads and writes across multiple regions. Which deployment strategy should they use?

Hard
41

A company wants to monitor the performance of their application against a Service Level Objective (SLO) of 99.9% availability over a 30-day rolling window. They plan to use Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver). Which metric should they use as the Service Level Indicator (SLI) for availability?

Easy
42

A company runs a global e-commerce platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a Cloud SQL for MySQL database. During promotions, traffic spikes cause database connection limits to be exceeded, leading to errors. The application uses the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy. What is the MOST scalable and cost-effective solution?

Hard
43

Which Google Cloud service automatically computes the optimal size or tier for underutilized Compute Engine instances and generates recommendations to reduce cost?

Easy
44

An engineer is designing a Bigtable schema for time-series data consisting of sensor readings. Each sensor emits a reading every second. The access pattern is to retrieve all readings for a specific sensor within a time range. Which row key design will provide the best performance?

Hard
45

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine behind a Global HTTPS Load Balancer. Users report slow page loads, especially for static assets. The development team wants to cache content closer to users without modifying code. Which GCP service should they enable?

Medium
46

A company stores infrequently accessed data in Cloud Storage Standard class. To reduce costs, they want to automatically move objects older than 90 days to a lower-cost storage class. Which approach should they use?

Medium
47

A team is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application. They need to ensure RPO of less than 1 hour and RTO of less than 4 hours. The application runs on Compute Engine with persistent disks and uses Cloud SQL for MySQL. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose 3.)

Medium
48

A team runs a Cloud Spanner instance with a regional configuration. They need to increase write throughput for a global user base but are concerned about cost. What should they do?

Hard
49

A company runs batch machine learning training jobs that can be interrupted. They want to reduce compute costs. Which Compute Engine VM pricing model is MOST cost-effective?

Easy
50

An application uses Cloud Bigtable and experiences high latency for reads. The row key is a timestamp prefix followed by a random ID. Queries often scan a range of timestamps for a specific ID. What design change would MOST improve read performance?

Medium
51

An application uses Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) and experiences high connection overhead, often exhausting the max connections limit. The team wants to maintain a pool of persistent connections without modifying application code. Which solution should they implement?

Hard
52

A data analytics team runs ad-hoc SQL queries on BigQuery to explore a 10 TB table. Queries are slow and expensive because they frequently scan the entire table. They want to reduce query costs and improve performance without changing the table schema. Which optimization should they apply first?

Easy
53

A company runs a web application behind a Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer. Static content (images, CSS, JS) is served from Cloud Storage. They want to reduce latency for users worldwide. Which action is MOST effective?

Medium
54

A company runs a global application that requires strong consistency across regions for financial transactions. Which database should they choose?

Medium
55

A company is migrating 100 TB of on-premises file shares to Cloud Storage. The network bandwidth is limited to 100 Mbps and the migration must complete within 2 weeks. Which TWO services should they consider? (Choose 2)

Medium
56

A team wants to automatically move data from Cloud Storage Standard class to Nearline class after 30 days, and to Archive class after 365 days. Which GCP feature should be used?

Easy
57

An e-commerce platform uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL to serve product catalog data. As traffic grows, the database experiences high connection overhead and latency spikes. The team wants to reduce connection overhead and improve performance without changing application code. Which solution should they implement?

Medium
58

A startup is migrating its on-premises MySQL database (5 TB) to Cloud SQL. The database is mission-critical and downtime must be minimized. Which migration service should they use to reduce downtime?

Easy
59

A company needs to store petabytes of time-series IoT sensor data and query it with single-digit millisecond latency at millions of reads per second. The data has a simple key-value structure with timestamps. Which Google Cloud database is MOST appropriate?

Medium
60

A company is migrating 500 TB of on-premises file server data to Cloud Storage. The on-premises network has a 1 Gbps link to Google Cloud, but the migration must complete within 30 days. What is the MOST cost-effective and reliable method?

Medium
61

A team wants to define an SLO for a service that requires 99.9% availability over a 30-day window. They need to measure the ratio of successful requests to total requests. Which SLI should they use?

Easy
62

A company is migrating a large on-premises data warehouse to BigQuery. The data includes sensitive customer information that must be encrypted at rest and in transit. They also need to mask credit card numbers for analysts who do not have a need to see the full number. Which TWO Google Cloud services should they use? (Choose 2.)

Medium
63

A company wants to analyze the total cost of ownership (TCO) for migrating their on-premises data center to Google Cloud. They need to compare compute, storage, and network costs, including operational expenses like maintenance and power. Which tool should they use?

Medium
64

A company runs a Bigtable instance for real-time analytics. They notice increasing latency for point reads. The row key pattern is 'YYYYMMDD_userID_productID'. The team suspects read hotspots. Which row key design change would BEST distribute the load across tablets?

Hard
65

A team wants to provide a consistent, low-latency experience for global users accessing static content (images, CSS, JS) hosted on Cloud Storage. They also need to be able to invalidate cached content quickly when updates occur. Which service should they use?

Medium
66

A company runs a batch processing job that uses preemptible VMs. The job occasionally fails due to VM preemption. They want to improve reliability without significantly increasing cost. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose TWO.)

Easy
67

A company is moving a legacy application to Compute Engine. The application has inconsistent resource usage and the team wants to optimise costs without performance degradation. They are evaluating committed use discounts (CUDs) and other discount types. Which THREE statements are correct about CUDs? (Choose 3)

Hard
68

A company wants to improve the performance of their Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance. They notice many idle connections and slow queries. Which THREE actions could help? (Choose 3)

Medium
69

A company wants to define an SLO for their application's availability. They measure that the application was down for 30 minutes in a 30-day period. What is the availability SLO that they can achieve?

Easy
70

A company wants to automatically move data from Cloud Storage Standard to Nearline after 30 days and to Archive after 90 days. Which approach should they use?

Medium
71

A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine with a 1-year commitment for cost savings. They want to also optimize for performance by using machine types with more memory. They plan to update to a different machine series during the commitment term. Which committed use discount type allows this flexibility?

Medium
72

A company wants to migrate a MySQL database running on-premises to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime. Which GCP service should they use?

Easy
73

A development team uses BigQuery for analytical queries. They want to reduce query costs for a large table that is frequently filtered by a date column and a customer_id column. Which TWO table design strategies will reduce the amount of data scanned? (Choose 2)

Easy
74

An application running on Compute Engine frequently makes connection requests to a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance. The connections are short-lived and many are created per second. What should be implemented to reduce latency and connection overhead?

Medium
75

An e-commerce application uses Firestore for product catalog. They need to run complex analytical queries on the catalog data, such as aggregations and joins, without impacting production performance. What is the best approach?

Medium
76

A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application. They need to ensure that if the primary region fails, the application can fail over to a secondary region with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes. The application uses Cloud Spanner. Which Cloud Spanner configuration meets these requirements?

Medium
77

An organization deploys a web application on Compute Engine behind a global HTTPS load balancer. They want to reduce latency for users worldwide and minimize load on backend instances. Which GCP service should they use?

Medium
78

A company is migrating a 200 TB on-premises file server to Cloud Storage. The network bandwidth is limited to 100 Mbps. The migration must complete within 30 days. Which approach should they use?

Medium
79

A company is adopting Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. After a major incident, they want to conduct a review to understand what went wrong and how to prevent recurrence, without blaming individuals. Which SRE practice should they follow?

Easy
80

A company runs a latency-sensitive web application on Compute Engine in us-east1. They want to improve response times for users in Europe and Asia without changing the application architecture. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose 2.)

Hard
81

A company is migrating a large Oracle database (5 TB) from on-premises to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. They require minimal downtime and automated schema conversion. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Hard
82

A startup is designing a real-time leaderboard for a multiplayer game. The leaderboard must update within seconds of a score change and handle millions of concurrent players. Strong consistency is not required, but availability is critical. Which database is most suitable?

Hard

Frequently asked questions

What does the Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes domain cover on the PCA exam?
Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
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This page lists all 82 Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes questions in the PCA question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
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